Daniel Without Make-up And Long Toes

Revisiting and stripping the Daniel prophecies of the pollution by all kinds of philosophy through the centuries (the make-up) and artificial insertions (the long toes of the so-called ‘church age’). The authors weighed the Daniel prophecies against recorded history. In the process important distortions in modern end-times doctrines are exposed. More

Many books and articles have been written on the apocalyptic book of Daniel in the Old Testament of the Bible. A search by the authors for the expression Daniel’s Seventy Weeks on the Internet for example, turned up 574 000 results. One has to dig deep though, to find articles or books showing that the writer was prepared to look at Daniel without all the make-up imposed on it through pagan techniques of philosophy and modern spiritual philosophising.The Book of Daniel is mostly the foundational starting point of the modern end-times doctrines and it is the book from which the so-called Antichrist world ruler to come is construed and upon which many calculations of end-times related dates have been made and remade over and over again.The Christian faith has become the target of growing skepticism and outright derogatory accusations of following myths. Although wrong and twisted doctrines have made their contribution over a long time, this skepticism has been fuelled in no small way by modern end-times teaching and its abundance of unfulfilled predictions that have come and gone. The ‘make-up’ part of the title refers to the centuries of philosophised approaches and interpretations that have been applied to the book of Daniel, while the long toes idea comes from a chart of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s vision, depicting an inserted so-called church age as ten very long toes already covering some 2000 years. An important part of the authors' approach is to settle the contextual background before discussing the prophecies.

Gerrie and Martie Malan were married in 1970. Shortly afterwards he entered a new career in the South African Correctional Services, where he served for 25 years. They were transferred many times and also had to relocate twice annually between Pretoria and Cape Town for eight years when Gerrie was a member of the Correctional Services’ Parliamentary staff. Although Martie could take up employment for short periods in those years, she mostly found herself in the role of home maker, raising their three children – often under difficult circumstances.Shortly after he was released on pension in 1995 following severe burnout, Gerrie became a lecturer in Correctional Management at the Technikon SA, which later merged with the University of South Africa. It was in this time that they left the Reformed church in which they were raised to go on a journey through the Pentecostal and Charismatic environments in search of biblical truth.Martie, in the meantime, had taken on studies in biblical counselling, with Gerrie soon joining her. While she focussed on the area of emotional healing, Gerrie’s focus was on spiritual warfare. He continued afterwards with studies in the ministry environment and eventually completed a doctoral degree in Systematic Theology through the United Kingdom based Calvary University. For his thesis he studied Christ’s ‘born again’ and Paul’s ‘in Christ’ concepts. On their journey they had wonderful experiences and met precious people, church leaders as well as ordinary church members. But as they studied the Scriptures, more and more questions arose about specific traditional church doctrines.A home group of five in April 2001 soon grew to a weekly meeting of some 50 people. The group quickly grew into a formal congregation (Hosea Christian Family Church), which later joined with another where Gerrie and Martie took up the leadership of the Bible College. Today they are not attached to any denomination as they focus on the search for biblical truth on many questions that developed during their journey through the Reformed, Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions. Unlike so many others who in similar processes have turned their back on the Bible, they feel that they have developed a much better understanding of the simple biblical truths when it is stripped of centuries of philosophising and pollution which robbed humanity of the kingdom life that was and is in God’s heart for His people. The couple currently reside in the town of Hibberdene in the Kwazulu-Natal Province of South Africa. They have three married children and six grandchildren.